Clustering options

[Justin Hopper]

On Mon, 2004-11-22 at 17:09, Matt Olander wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 22, 2004 at 05:20:30PM -0800, Justin Hopper wrote:
> > Interesting.  So most blade servers allow for each node in the cluster
> > to run as it's own system, for example as a webserver, right?
> 
> Yes. The blades are all independent systems that share common
> redundant infrastructure, such as switch, powersupply, etc. 
> 
> > Is there no appliance that allows for the details of the hardware to be
> > hidden from the OS and instead present to the OS a unified architecture,
> > like it's just one machine, but with the ability to add more nodes to
> > expand CPU, RAM, and disk?  I guess this was my misunderstanding, as
> > this is what I assumed the blade systems did.  I assume it would be
> > incredibly tricky to manage dynamically configurable hardware in the
> > operating system, but I also assumed that somebody had pulled it off,
> > but maybe not?
> 
> Sure. You can buy a Sun Micro Fire 12k 36-way for about 1.3 million ;)
> An x86 based blade system combined with some opensource fail-over
> software will definitely do what you need though, and is quite a bit
> easier on the wallet!

Thanks for the info, Matt.  This is indeed what I wanted to know about
blade servers.  Unfortunate that they are not what I had thought they
were though.

I'll take a look at the docs for freevrrpd, that sounds pretty
interesting.
-- 
Justin Hopper  <jhopper at bsdhosting.net>
UNIX Systems Engineer
BSDHosting.net
Hosting Division of Digital Oasys Inc.
http://www.bsdhosting.net